Preparing is the Hard Part

I’ve somehow managed to find myself cast in the fairly uncomfortable role of Tour Manager for a trip to Europe with friends and family.

I know, for some readers that might be a “problem” you’d kill to have, but it’s been absorbing my time and my limited brain power trying to coordinate the needs and desires of several people at the same time without having the power to simply make decisions and impose them on the participants.

It began innocently enough with a call to my uncle (I’ll call him Richard, since that’s his name), asking him if he’d like to go to Spain. Richard (he used to be “Dick,” but apparently nobody wants to be a Dick anymore…) was in the US Navy when he was a young man, and for a time was stationed in Rota, Spain, on the Atlantic coast about halfway between Portugal and Gibraltar.

Long after leaving the Navy, Di… er, Richard would often say, “I’d like to go back to Rota to see what it looks like now,” and I’d say, “You should.” Then he’d give me some version of “Yes, but…”  Years passed and he married April, and then he’d add her to the wish list: “I should go back to Spain and take April,” and I’d say, “Go for it,” but he’d have a reason that he couldn’t. Then they had their son, Chris, and Richard would say, “I should go back to Spain and take April and Chris,” and… Well, you see where this is going, right?  A few years later they had a daughter, Dawn, and she was added to the list: “I should…” I finally gave up encouraging him, or at least thinking that my encouragement would provide any sort of incentive.

So let’s fast forward to last winter when I was sitting in my office at Butte College and pondering my fast-approaching retirement from teaching. Along with a certain amount of anxiety about such a huge change came the realization that for the first time in three decades I’d be able to travel in a season other than summer! I started thinking about all the places I’d like to visit and revisit, and it occurred to me to give Richard one last try. I called him and asked if he wanted to go to Spain with me in the fall and he LEAPED on board. (Naval allusion entirely conscious)

I think he was previously reluctant to try it on his own because he had been so young in the Navy, they had made all arrangements and plans for him,  he didn’t speak Spanish and he probably was a little intimidated by the prospect of organizing and carrying out the planning and then functioning in a foreign country in a foreign language with the responsibility of taking care of the family.

When I offered to accompany them I solved those problems. I’m not an expert in Spain, nor am I fluent in Spanish– I speak what I refer to as “enthusiastic if ungrammatical Spanish”– but I’m an experienced international traveler and have a decent grasp on how to get around in another culture. “How long can you be gone?” I asked Richard, and he said, “A month.” I said, “That’s too long for Spain alone– let’s go to Italy, too.”

He talked it over with April and Chris and Dawn and they all fell in line, along with their spouses/significant others. Now the group had grown to 7. I added my friends Don and Myra and now we were 9. It had become a tour group. Mea culpa…

Here’s the problem: If I were a tour director I’d simply make all the reservations and plans and say, “Here’s what we’re doing and where we’re staying,” but with so many other free agents along on the trip I couldn’t simply force my will on them. Thus began a process that is still working itself out, as time for planning dwindles between now (9/16) and the time we leave (10/5).

First we needed an apartment in Florence, since that was the place we’d be in the longest and apartments are usually much cheaper for a group than separate hotels would be. I went online and found several and sent those suggestions out to all the parties and awaited their responses. (Cue the ticking clock indicating the passage of time.) We finally agreed on a place on Lungarno Colombo that had (barely) enough room for nine. Then we needed to find airline tickets, firm up a calendar, make reservations for hotels, arrange travel between sites…

Now, finally, it’s nearly all finished. All that remains is to find a hotel or hotels in Florence for the single night between the day we arrive and the next afternoon when we take the keys to the apartment.

Here’s our itinerary as it currently stands:

I leave first, on October 5 from Seattle, where I can leave my car with family, and from SeaTac I found a non-stop to Heathrow. Land in London 10/6 and spend two nights at a hotel recommended by my friend Alison Keye, who once lived in London and still knows her way around.

October 8– fly to Madrid and meet Don and Myra.

October 10– Richard and April join us in Madrid.

October 12– I go with Richard and April to Rota (actually fly into Jerez de la Frontera). We’ll spend a couple of days seeing Rota, visiting Gibraltar and Sevilla and environs.

October 14– fly to Barcelona where we again meet Don and Myra.

October 16– fly to Florence. Hotel we have yet to identify.

October 17– get the keys to the apartment. Chris flies in that day. Now we’re six.

October 22– Windee (Chris’s S.O.) joins us. Now we’re seven.

October 24– we all go to Venice for two nights. Everyone else is staying on the island in the Locanda ai Bareteri, a small hotel I like a lot, but Don, Myra and I are staying on the adjacent island of Giudecca instead, which is quieter and cheaper. It’s a short vaporetto ride.

October 26– we head north to Bolzano, a little city at the foot of the Dolomite Alps. It was Austria until after WWI and some people there think it still is. Many of the signs are in German with Italian subtitles. It feels more germanic, too. No graffiti, very clean, and it looks like someone even scrubbed the dust off the fruit trees that morning. It’s also the city that has the remains of Oetzi, the name given to the well-preserved natural mummy found in 1991 in a high pass above Bolzano, where he had been frozen in a glacier since around 3,300 BCE. He was given the nickname “The Iceman,” for obvious reasons. He’s in a museum in the city.

October 27 back to Florence, where Dawn and her husband Noel join us. Now we’re nine, and sleeping arrangements would have gotten tricky had not the landlord proposed a solution: he owns another apartment upstairs and was willing to rent it to us, so Don, Myra and I are moving upstairs that day and now everyone has a bedroom.

That’s all the firm planning that has been done, but we’ll also be visiting some of my other favorite places, and other sites that are more or less obligatory for new travelers: Pisa, Lucca, Cinque Terre, Rome, maybe even as far south as Sorrento. We have three weeks in Florence, using it as our base of travels, so we can use our time as we wish.

OK, this was over-long, but I thought it would be helpful to give a proper perspective to this (mis?)adventure. Stay tuned for updates from Europe!